


an unconnected me, yet a connected me

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Gen, Humanstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 05:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6787360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone who met the pair later, in college, knew that they were best friends. That they would always be best friends. This is how it begins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an unconnected me, yet a connected me

**_June 1999 - Yekaterina Levin_ **

Sometimes, in retrospect, you wish he had been less interesting. Then you would have never gotten involved with his general existence, and all the drama situated therein. He would have just been yet another random boy from school, and you wouldn’t have thought anything of him.

You certainly wouldn’t have gotten to know him, or befriended him, or later worried yourself sick over his bad decisions.

Then again, you would have never met one of your favorite people - pain in the ass that he could be.

And he _was_ _fascinating_. He _was_ _different_. So were you.

This is how it went.

_**September 1992** _

Aside from wordlessly directing you to your homeroom on your first day of 9th grade, the guy who helped you happens to possess these little tics. His hands twitch. When he sits, his leg shakes with astounding regularity, up and down, up and down, like a metronome turned sideways.

You are a bonafide artist-author-person, fourteen years old and ready to revolutionize the world, so it’s your job to notice things outside of the ordinary. It’s your duty to color outside of the lines. That was the entire point of your attending a secular co-ed high school, other than your parents’ decision to slowly leave Orthodox Judaism behind.

So you take special notice of this boy. Whenever you see him in the cafeteria, he’s usually alone. Alone, with a book in one hand, and a giant cup of coffee in the other. He operates in his own personal bubble, one you’re reluctant to intrude upon.

You won’t admit this to anyone, but since you haven’t yet heard him talk as of the second week of class, you privately wonder if (hope that?) he’s like you. You want to try signing to him, but you ultimately decide against it.

You learn that his name is Simon Cao, because he has gym with you, though he sits several rows away. Moreover, he shows up so infrequently that your teacher droning his name two, three, four times before marking him absent becomes something of an inside joke among your class. That makes the name easy to remember.

 _“Bueller…? Bueller…? Bueller…?”_ A kid in back of you intones, to raucous laughter. You don’t understand the reference, but you join in anyway.

Simon notices you too, on an afternoon when a few people start making fun of your clunky hearing aid and your awkward enunciation. Sitting against a row of lockers, he glances up from his reading material of the week, and lets the book slide shut.

Being that he cuts class to smoke cigarettes across the street from school instead of going to gym, you figure he has to be just as disrespectful as the others. You expect him to mock you, but he merely blinks a few times. He inclines his head toward the upperclassmen, and flips them off one-handedly.

You don’t catch whatever words he has with them, but they leave after a brief exchange. You do a poor job of concealing your shock. As you thank him, he only stares at you with those mismatched eyes. One blue, and one brown.

Idly, you draw them during Biology, trying to get the monolids exactly right. It’s certainly more interesting than the taxonomic system. A glance around the classroom informs you that a good third of your classmates have fallen asleep.

So much for this school educating the some of the brightest minds of the future.

At the end of the day, you stand at the corner of Chambers Street counting out bus tokens, when Simon comes up behind you. You take one alarmed step back, remembering the talk your brother Yaakov gave you about boys.

“Tho you talk funny too,” Simon murmurs, adjusting the collar of his jacket. While you wear long sleeves and longer skirts for the sake of modesty, you have no idea what this kid’s deal is. It’s almost eighty degrees today.

You instinctively turn to face him with your better ear, and manage to catch wind of his godawful lisp. Despite it, you don’t particularly appreciate his statement. Who’s he to say you talk weird? He talks weirder.

You drop your backpack on the sidewalk, and cross your arms over your chest.

“Depends on your defurnition of funny,” you reply with a pout.

He lights his cigarette and grins, showing off an impressive array of orthodontic work. His doctor could probably afford to retire on his patronage alone. Then he shrugs, saying, “fair enough.”

One long inhale - during which he blows smoke into your face - and his expression grows serious.

“I don’t go after eathy prey,” he tells you. “I wathn’t trying to make fun of you, I thwear.”

This lanky nerd with braces and glasses calling you easy prey? 

You narrow your eyes, weigh your options, and decide to kick him right in the foot. Not the best way to repay his act of kindness from earlier in the day, but you never said you were the nicest person in the world. Not even in the top hundred, really.

“You thwear?” you ask, drawing out the syllables, gazing at him impishly.

He snorts, chokes on the exhale, and somehow, both of you end up dissolving into uncontrollable laughter. Students mill around you, freed from captivity for the afternoon, but you pay them no mind.

Each time you look at each other, you start cackling again. After a minute or so, he stubs out his cigarette against the adjacent building.  

“Tho, freshman, you got a name?”

You cross your arms again. “What makes you think I’m a freshman?”

He gestures to your backpack, points out that it’s almost as big as you are, and that you got lost as hell on your first day of school. No way could you be anything but a freshman. Okay, perhaps (perhapth) you could be an exceedingly dense sophomore, but you don’t strike him as being an idiot.

You tilt your head to one side, torn between offense and amusement.

“I’m going to assume that was a compliment,” you respond. “And my name’s Yekaterina.”

He butchers the pronunciation of your name so spectacularly (how even? not even your homeroom teacher’s attempt wasn't that awful) that you tell him to call you Katya. Or Cat. Whichever he finds easier. 

He subsequently introduces himself as Simon.

“I knew that already,” you confess.

“Really?”

You nod and clap once. (Katya, you couldn’t be more of an overexcited freshman if you tried).

“Yeah! You’re in my gym class!”

He lights yet another cigarette, mercifully blowing the smoke away from you, but apparently confused over something.

“I’m _taking gym?_ ”

You suppress the urge to laugh again. “Isn’t it mandatory for everyone?”

He feigns guilt at his truancy for an entire nanosecond.

“Well, if you want to get technical, I guethth it ith. But I’ve got more important thingth to do with my life than push-upth and bathketball and thtaring at thweaty guyth.”

He does have a point there. Nevertheless. If you have to bear witness to the human rights violation known as a bunch of sweat-reeking teenagers crammed into a small enclosed space four times a week, so should he. It’s only fair. Besides, then you’ll have someone to talk to while you run laps and try not to pass out in your gym clothes. All the other girls wear shorts, but not you, no way. You’re still observant in certain respects.

This is assuming he even wants to talk to you.

You think he might.

“Impurrtant things like smoking across the street?” you ask.

He quirks an eyebrow at you, thrown slightly off balance by your knowledge, but retorts with the creepiest grin you’ve seen outside of a horror movie.

“Have you been following me, Kitty-Cat?”

He doesn’t even wait for you to respond, preferring to fill in the blanks aloud and on his own.

So he has a freshman stalker with flaming red hair and a backpack the size of Russia, who also happens to be hard of hearing. At least they’re reasonably attractive for a creepy stalker, all things considered.

“I coulda done worthe,” he finally concludes.

Your mouth drops open, you blush the color of said hair, and you sock him in the arm, temporarily lost for words. You hope he’ll continue to feel that punch a week from now. Later he'll tell you that your ponytail stood on end, just like a cat's tail. What an asshole.

“I wasn’t stalking you!” you insist, turning away from him. “Way to flatter yourself, you jerk.”

It takes several minutes and more apologies than you can count on one hand for him to convince you that he was only messing around, _come on, Katya, don’t be like that._ You inform him that he sure has a strange sense of humor. He grins at you again, although less creepily.

“You don’t even know the half of it.”

“I’m not sure I want to.”

“Probably for the betht,” he admits, as the two of you walk down the stairs toward the 2 train. “Altho, thtupid quethtion, do you know what time it ith?”

You check your watch. “Twenty to four.”

Simon swears loudly, puts out his cigarette, fumbles around in his jacket pocket, extricates a pill bottle, and dry swallows a capsule in one practiced, fluid motion. That strikes you as being kind of odd; normally the only people you see taking medication are either really old or really sick. Maybe he falls into the latter category? You hope he’s not contagious.

“What’re those?” You ask, trying not to breathe in his air, just in case. He puts the bottle back, and the pair of you get on the train. Two stops later, he finally answers.

“Vitaminth.”

He turns away.

It’s quiet between the two of you for a while. You pull your geometry notebook out of your bag and start trying to make heads or tails of this parabola-related confusion. At least linear functions made some kind of logical sense. Trying to reckon with this second power stuff, though? And then graph it? Some of the people in your class can just look at a quadratic equation and solve it in half a second.

You are decidedly not that kind of student. To boot, you have ten questions to solve and graph, aside from the pile of reading you have to do for English, and the diagram you have to fill out for AP World.

You’re going to fail math with distinction. You close and reopen your notebook as if this will somehow cause the solutions to magically appear.

“Hey, Cat?” Simon asks you, glasses glinting off the train lights.

“Mm?”

“Gimme a piethe of paper, I have an idea.”

You really hate the thought of tearing sheets of paper out of your Hello Kitty notebook, so you just hand the entire thing to him. He flips to a blank sheet, and in spidery, cramped cursive, writes out, _ax^2+bx+c=0._

He nudges the notebook so it sits across your left thigh and his right. “That’th the standard form of a quadratic equation. Where a, b, and c are all known values, right?”

You momentarily focus your attention away from a piece of graffiti on the wall of the subway tunnel and try to look like you have a clue as to what’s going on.

“Uh, I think so?”

That sounds like something you may have learned at some point, probably when you were staring at the clock and counting down the seconds left until History. 

He then proceeds to write out a formula with entirely too many square root signs, letters, and symbols you’re pretty sure he made up on the spot (there is no way ± is a real thing). However, it makes sense when he explains it. Sort of.

“Thith’ll take longer than just factoring the equation, but knowing how to do it thith way will help you in the future,” he says. “Trutht me.”

You’ll take his word for it.

The next afternoon, during the train ride back to Brooklyn, you point out grammatical errors in his response essay for sophomore English. You’re amazed to find out that he’s only in the 10th grade; you assumed he had to be at least a junior for all the smoking he manages to fit into his schedule.

Helping each other with homework becomes something of a routine with you.

_(“Who giveth an actual fuck about thubject verb agreement?”_

_“The regents exam will.”_

_“You haven’t even taken the regentth.”_

_“Neither have you.”)_

_(“No, Si, mew should use the subjunctive here.”_

_“We have a thubjunctive tenthe?”)_

_(“I hope Willy Loman dieth on printhiple, he’th thuch a whiny fuck.”_

_“The play’s called Death of a Salesman. You just might get your wish.)_

During one of his rare appearances in gym class, he jokes that you are hear no evil, and he is speak no evil.

“All we need to do now ith find a blind guy.”

A basketball nearly smacks him in the face while he’s talking, but you punt it back in the other direction before it can meet its ultimate collision. You’ll never understand how he can be so intelligent, and yet such a dork.

You think over what he’s said. “That shouldn’t be difficult.”

“You know a lot of blind people?”

“I know a blind cat,” you explain. “He stays in this lot across the street from my building, and I feed him all the time!”

“Of courthe you do,” Simon replies archly.

While there are certain lines he won’t cross as far a making fun of you is concerned, your obsession with cats is completely fair game. You don’t get why he thinks it’s so entertaining. He keeps plants, and he’s _named_ them and everything. At least cats have sentience, and the ability to move around. All plants do is… whatever they do, which is pretty much nothing the last time you checked.

Still, talking about your cat, although he’s not really _your_ cat, gets you excited.

“His name’s Tiresias. He’s super furriendly!”

“Tie-what?”

“Y’know, the blind seer in Greek mythology.” You repeat the name more slowly. “Tiresias.”

“Nope,” he says. “I don’t read, remember?”

“You read science textbooks.”

“You told me that didn’t count.”

That is true. Halliday and Resnick does not constitute _proper_   _literature,_ unless you count the subject of physics to be inherently tragic for its difficulty. 

He asks you to introduce him to this friend of yours, probably to humor you, and you’re overjoyed to oblige. 

The problem is Tiresias does not seem to like Simon nearly as much as he likes you. Instead of greeting him with a meow and a friendly nuzzle - the way he does to you - he hisses, growls, and readies to attack. All before Simon has a chance to so much as open his mouth. 

You yank Simon out of the way and stroll in the other direction, pulling him after you.

“Thome friend you have. What an aththhole,” he scowls.

Well, that could have gone better, you reflect. “Maybe he’s just having a bad day.”

“He’s a cat.”

“Cats can have bad days.”

He doesn’t bother trying to refute that.

One evening in November, you two take a detour to Tompkins Square Park instead of going straight home from school. Your mother would keel over in horror if she saw you hanging around here, amid the buskers, the junkies, the homeless, and all the other “unsavory people” that frequent this part of town. A man stands near the fence, playing a saxophone. You don’t recognize the tune, but you do recognize his state - complete flow, utterly unencumbered.

You aspire to achieve that level of mental dedication.

You take out your math notebook and begin a preliminary sketch. Standing behind the bench you sit upon, Simon leans over you, breathing against your ear, but you don’t mind. You’ve become accustomed to his penchant for close proximity with friends. He doesn’t mean anything by it. 

He stretches his thin arms skyward. “You’re an artitht. Like, a legit one.”

“Thank you?”

He calls you a regular renaissance (oh how he mangles the word) (wo)man, what with the writing, and the art, and all the other things you’re into. Then, he strikes an exaggerated pose, accidentally tapping out cigarette ashes on his pants. He brushes them off and shrugs.

“You should totally draw me, Cat.”

You already have, surreptitiously, but you’re not about to tell him that. That would feed into his creepy freshman stalker theory.

“And why should I do that?” you grin.

“Cauthe I athked nithely?”

You argue the point only because it’s practically required of you.

“Maybe when I’m finished with this one. But you’d have to sit still for a while.”

“Shit, well, that’th out, then.”


End file.
